5 - Nostromo

Summary

There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.

Mrs Gould in Nostromo, p. 521

With Nostromo and The Secret Agent we reach the summit of Conrad's achievement as a novelist. I may begin to substantiate this claim by noting that these two novels are at least as closely related as (in one way) The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’, or (in another) Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes. It has become standard practice to connect Nostromo with its predecessor and The Secret Agent with its successor. Thus Robert Penn Warren argues that Nostromo is an elaboration of the conflict between the ideal and the real exhibited in Lord Jim, and Irving Howe that the sardonic treatment of the anarchists in The Secret Agent anticipates Conrad's ‘antipathy toward the revolutionary émigrés in Under Western Eyes’. I am not suggesting that such correlations are illegitimate; but they have the effect of obscuring how very distinctively these two central masterpieces resemble each other. Notably, both bring to the foreground not a single protagonist doubled by a single narrator but a number of equally prominent individuals, each of whom is repeatedly called upon to comment on his fellows. Furthermore, these foreground characters are not only presented in relation to one another but also in relation to a middle-ground of subordinate figures of great variety, and to the background of an entire population.